Religion and survival among European older adults

Konstantinos Christopoulos

European Journal of Ageing, 2023, vol. 20, issue 1, No 42, 12 pages

Abstract: Abstract There are several pathways through which religion can affect longevity. Previous research, predominately from North America, has shown decreased mortality risk for participants that attended religious services. This study aims to examine the association between religion and all-cause mortality in a large sample of older European adults, comparing religious affiliations, and using prayer frequency as well as frequency of participation in a religious organisation as measures of religiousness. To this end, a total of 16,062 participants from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe were employed for a survival analysis (median follow-up 11.3 years; 3790 recorded deaths). Following a religion was negatively associated with mortality regardless of demographic and socioeconomic factors (HR = 0.81; 95% CI 0.74–0.89). Large differences in the median survival of participants from different religious affiliations can be mostly attributed to demographic and socioeconomic factors. Both frequency of prayer and religious participation exhibited a significant positive dose–response relationship with survival despite adjustments, although the results for religious participation were more profound. Changes on the religiosity levels of the European population will require additional research on the subject in the future.

Keywords: Longevity; Mortality; Religiousness; SHARE; Survival analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10433-023-00789-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eujoag:v:20:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s10433-023-00789-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... iences/journal/10433

DOI: 10.1007/s10433-023-00789-4

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Ageing is currently edited by Marja Aartsen, Susanne Iwarsson and Prof. Dr. Matthias Kliegel

More articles in European Journal of Ageing from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().